Early Stages of The Movement
In 1966, for the first time in fifteen years, the German economy went into recession and the FDP finally withdrew from Ludwig Erhard's CDU/CSU/FDP coalition government. With the forming of the CDU/CSU/SPD coalition government under Kurt Georg Kiesinger the voice of the opposition within the Bundestag was seriously weakened. This led some students to conclude that this encouraged authoritarian and anti-democratic attitudes in government and therefore justified and indeed necessitated the transfer of opposition from parliament to bodies outside it. At the same time, the shock of realising that the Wirtschaftswunder could not last forever led many in the student body, influenced by Marxist economic theory, to believe that the economic wealth of the nation, instead of improving the standard of living of the working class, would destroy it and lead to an ever-growing gap between the rich and the poor.
Through their critical work on many different topics and the reactions of the public and the government itself, these main goals formed in the minds of the students:
- Changing society for more democracy.
- Dealing with Germany's and their parents' National Socialist past.
- Reforming the curriculum.
- Stopping the war in Vietnam and improving the horrible conditions in the Third World.
- Reducing the influence of the right-wing press (especially publications from the Axel Springer publishing house) on the masses and its abuse of the freedom of press.
- Stopping the planned German emergency legislation (Notstandsgesetze) from being passed.
The first goal was the source of all the others and thus the most important in their minds.
To summarise, the students rejected traditional, parliamentary decision making-processes, social injustice and the inequalities of wealth. They felt the need to overcome and change these things.
Read more about this topic: German Student Movement
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